If you need to keep using a func_wall in some situation, tyrann added support to make it cast shadows - just set "_shadow" "1" on the func_wall. 

Portaling, and just the investment time of making the textures and models, lighting the maps, etc. It's not fun to spend an entire Quake map of time and not have an entire map. 

To say nothing of the amount of non-map work that would be needed for idtech 5. 

Is it possible to add _sunlight2 and _sunlight3 from AguirRe's tools? Some of my maps depended quite heavily on that. What it does is basically add a bit of minlight only around the areas that have sky, so you can still get 100% black shadows in indoor areas.

Stark black shadows around outdoor areas are quite rare in nature, hence why I liked to use it. I also liked how it seeped into neighbouring areas a bit. I found it quite natural.

The alternative with the current tools would be to manually place some local minlights around, but that's comparatively sketchy. _sunlight3 was nice and easy, but if I'm the only one who ever uses that, it might be too much work for you...

I really like the dirtmapping, so I don't necessarily want to switch back to BengtLightColoured.

Thanks for mentioning the _shadow key, I'll have to play around with that one. 

It really helps soften those hard shadows. 

osx win32 src

The only changes are more options to control AO:

- _dirtmode/_dirtdepth/_dirtscale/_dirtgain worldspawn keys
- _dirtscale/_dirtgain can be customized per-light
- _nodirt can be set on a light to ignore AO for that light (so it illuminates the AO shadows)
- _sunlight_nodirt can be set on the worldspawn to disable AO for sunlight

In the previous build, dynamic lights were not affected by AO, now they are unless you specify _nodirt.

If it's annoying with AO as opt-out I can make it opt-in, or add a command line switch to make it opt-in. I'm worried about the settings getting too complex, so feedback welcome.


re: _sunlight2/_sunlight3, I can put it on my to-do list. I tried deleting the lights in jam2_mfx and testing _sunlight/_sunlight2/_sunlight3 from bjptools_xt in the outdoor area and didn't seem much improvement between the different sunlight modes. I'm interested to see what Lunaran is cooking with metlslime's idea of distributing lights around a dome.

From what rebb was saying and what I've read, AO should be applied to fill lights that are simulating reflections/indirect lighting. so I'm interested to see what can be done with AO to fill in ambient light in outdoor areas. 

So... on your light you would put :-

_nodirt "1"

is that correct? 

There's more detail in the light manual too 

ericw you mistyped RTFM 

http://imgur.com/a/urAJn#0 

 

Yes it would be better to have it opt-in. Just activate it on certain lights. 

I wander around a lot.. 

Yes it would be better to have it opt-in. Just activate it on certain lights.

Disagree. I just had a play with this, and I'd definitely want AO on all lights and I'd only opt-out when I come across the "alcove problem" (or similar situation) as described earlier.

It just looks too cool! Who cares if it's not physically realistic? 

I prefer opt-out too. 

I was gonna suggest that perhaps you could set the default behaviour on the command line. Then I decided it would be nicer to just have it recorded on the map. So how about something like a "_dirt" key on the worldspawn which controls whether lights are dirtmapped by default, and then a "_dirt_override" key on lights which toggles them relative to the chosen default? 

Yeah there are probably good uses cases for both default off and default on.

What about:

_dirt 1/-1 on worldspawn for setting the default on/off,
_dirt 1/-1 per-light for forcing it on/off for that light?

The the _nodirt and _sunlight_nodirt keys could be removed, though to keep control of sunlight we'd need _sunlight_dirt 1/-1. 

then a "_dirt_override" key on lights which toggles them relative to the chosen default?

Well if we're going down that road, I think we need to be explicit, not relative, something like on the worldspawn have "_dirt_default" (0/1)

then on lights have:

"_dirt_override":
0 - use worldspawn default
1 - override default - AO on
2 - override default - AO off

then, if you toggle the worldspawn key, you don't change the behaviour of those lights with override set.

if you set nothing for the _dirt_override key on a light then it, uses the world default 

yeah I like your 1/-1 idea 

That seems the better option. Looking forward to messing about with this. 

 

surely now these two:

_dirty 0/1 (enable/disable dirtmapping)
_dirt -1/1 (set default dirmapping flag for lights)

can be simplified to just the one...

_dirt (-1/0/1) (set default dirtmapping flag on lights, or disable dirtmapping on everything)

does that make it less complicated or more complicated? lol

for the sake of less flags and switches to worry about, I'd also be tempted to remove the dirt-related command line options and just keep the worldspawn / entity options 

I'll send you my sky code in a bit, but you're going to hate the diff because I couldn't stand the batshit indentation. 

i just want to recompile dm3 with ao
where to i put the command line in light.exe? 

"light.exe -dirty dm3.bsp" should do it. The default effect is subtle, you can add "-dirtscale 2" for more.